My dear, When I die, I want to come back and haunt you for the days, weeks, months, even years that should have been ours. Maybe you’ll be really old by then, your skin hanging in life-stained, elephant folds. I hope so. I hope you will have lived a good, long life. I’ll remember you as you were, with all your hair and dark fur on your body; you were solid in flesh and in values. But I will still love you denuded of hair and body fur, less tethered to flesh and values, closer perhaps to what I am. I’ll perch on your lap with my arms around your neck and lean in close to kiss you. Will you remember then? You may have to feel your way back to the memory past my icy cold lips, past whatever mangling may have occurred on the way to my ghostly state. I’ll slide a cold hand under your shirt and lay my head on your shoulder and remind you. We’ll hang a white sheet over …

Barricade the doors and prepare your materials. For the head, a clutch of cables stripped down to their raw copper cores carrying shudders of memory. For eyes and ears, a twist of coaxials and a flicker of fiber optics. Zip tie at random to provide an illusion of control. No mouth because you never spoke out even when you thought you might. Craft fingers from the cheap cigarettes you bought though split peas were cheaper and the soup would have nourished you at least a little. For lungs, a handful of the split peas you ought to have bought, closed up in a tin. They should rattle. For the belly, a wad of diary pages. Use gloves, they will be mucky. For legs, stack the contents of your worst-day bedroom floor, from books up to bottles. Determine that whatever direction they tilt is forward. For feet, use the boots, the ones that could coax a tango from a tilt. For the heart, an envelope to enclose the shadows you loved. Their subjects were only distractions. …